Since 1956, Asia's top football nations have come together to compete for continental supremacy. Since those early days, the tournament has grown from a small beginnings to be a large month long shindig. The upcoming tournament in Australia will be the biggest and best so far, and even that will be usurped four years later when twenty four teams will compete for Asian glory.Asia has long had the potential to be a global rising power of football, a potential that has yet to be fully realised. On the global stage, Asian sides have had only sporadic success. Within Asia though, the competition has been closely fought and intense, with no little drama.
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The Asian Cup, the primary tournament
of the Asian Football Confederation, has developed hugely in size, scope and
prestige over the years since its mid 1950s inception. A slightly ramshackle early tournament with few
participants has become an increasingly large and closely fought competition
with a healthy level of competition at the top.
It has gone through a number of
format changes through the years, a trend which is still continuing today, with
an expanding field of nations taking part and a frequently expanding number of
teams in the finals. There have been
sustained periods of dominance by some countries, falls from grace, and new
powers rising. What has occurred on the
world stage for Asian nations, be that in World Cup or Olympic Games, has frequently
been mirrored in the Asian Cup and many an Asian nation to have made a global
breakthrough have cut their teeth prior success at this continental level.
For a region that has traditionally
been a backwater of world football, Asia, specifically China, is often
considered to be the birth place of a form of football, independent of the
street tussles in England in centuries past and significantly earlier than
them. The Chinese game of “Tsu-Chu” or
“kick ball” as it translates, is the most similar to modern day football, with
records of the game beginning during the Tsin Dynasty between 255-206BC. Soldiers competed in a training exercise
featuring a leather ball being kicked into a net strung between two poles, which
all sounds rather familiar.
But as far as modern football is
concerned, like so much of the world the sport of football was brought to Asia
by English, or in Asia’s case also French, Spanish and Portuguese, merchants
and military through the 19th and early 20th centuries. China saw some of the earliest football
development with clubs in Guangzhou and Hong Kong appearing in the 1880s with
cup competitions mimicking the FA Cup appearing towards the end of the 19th
century.
International competition in Asia
began in the early twentieth century with various tussles between club sides
representing their nations. The first
Far Eastern Games of 1913 records a football tournament won by the hosts
Philippines who beat China 2-1, though in fact the Philippines were represented
by their champion club Bohemians and fielded several British, Spanish and
American players. China too were
represented by a club, the South China Athletics Association based in Hong
Kong. Clubs representing nations was not
uncommon at the time, with many of the early Olympic football tournaments
following a similar vein.
The first recorded full
representative international involving Asian sides was in 1917 when the
Philippines travelled to Tokyo to give the Japanese an absolute pummelling,
winning 15-2. Indeed the Philippines
were one of the early “powers” of Asian football, but given their strong
colonial influences from Spain and earlier from the British, they not only had
been exposed earlier than others to football, but also could take advantage of
the many colonials living there.
It was the 1930s before Asian teams
started to appear more globally, not only in the nascent World Cup, but also
the Olympic Games. Japan took part, and
indeed won a match against Sweden, at the 1936 Olympics, coming before any far
eastern nations had played World Cup football, although the British Mandate of
Palestine took the first global steps for Asia in the qualification round for
the World Cup of 1934.
International competition within Asia
began in an organised form with the 1951 Asian Games held in New Delhi, India,
where six nations competed and the hosts came out victorious a year after
missing out on a World Cup place. The
1954 Asian Games saw twelve nations competing in Manila, Philippines, and those
twelve nations got together whilst in Manila to form the Asian Football
Confederation, which was sanctioned by FIFA later that year. Two years later the first Asian Cup took
place in Hong Kong, and has occurred regularly ever since, as Asian football
has developed and grown.
Asian football has also been rather
difficult to define geographically over the years, with a somewhat flexible
approach to its boundaries. Israel have
led something of a nomadic footballing existence. Geographically part of Asia, Israel was an
AFC member from 1954 (though not a founding member) until being expelled in
1974 due to political pressure from Arab and Muslim members who refused to play
them. Until joining UEFA in 1992, Israel
existed in a football limbo with no confederation to call home.
A similar pariah situation existed
for Chinese Taipei, or the Republic of China to give its real name. The People’s Republic of China refused to
face their near neighbours for a time, as they refuse to recognise Chinese
Taipei as a nation. This led to Chinese
Taipei playing in the Oceania zone on many occasions. Other Asian geographical anomalies have seen
Kazakhstan and Australia switch federations, from Asia to Europe in the Kazakhs
case, and from Oceania to Asia for Australia.
As far as the Asian Cup is concerned,
historical information is rather more sketchy for the earlier tournaments than
for the more recent ones, naturally.
Asian Cups haven’t been documented to the same extent as World Cups or
European Championships, and so researching the details of the matches from the
50s, 60s and 70s has proved tricky. As a
consequence the first few chapters are brief, but I hope they give a feel for
the developing tournament and early development of Asian football, as well as providing
the historical facts of the Asian Cup.
Also, in the early years, the teams’
performances in the Asian Cup could be linked to showing in the Olympic Games
and Asian Games since they were all in effect full national teams. In more recent years that is no longer the
case of course, with both of those competitions being under-23 level making any
comparison of performances with those in the Asian Cup rather meaningless.
